It's with a heavy heart that we share this message with you.
After years of love and care poured into this little shop,
it's time for us to close.
A heartfelt message from a couple who are closing their boutique doors
with one final sale, ready to focus on their new role as grandparents.
At first glance, everything looks genuine — the emotional farewell,
the photo of the owners — but on second glance, things don't add up.
Despite the title referencing a local town, the shipping details
note that orders are dispatched from their warehouse in Central Asia.
A closer look at the photo suggests the smoothness and uniformity
of an AI-generated image.
As I dug further, I realised I hadn't just stumbled across one fake retailer.
I'd stumbled across a whole new business model.
But this is what really interested me.
What happens to all the genuine independent retailers when customers
stop trusting what they see online?
Ghost stores are no longer unusual.
What I am describing at the beginning of this episode is what consumer protection
organisations refer to as a ghost store.
It is an e-commerce website that is set up usually specifically to look
like a local independent retailer.
It will have the name of the town in the URL.
It will feature photographs or AI- generated photographs of owners
that do not exist, that are supposedly all from one location or another.
They are set up.
They start trading.
They usually run huge discounts disguised as closing down sales, and then they
disappear, leaving nothing behind other than disgruntled reviews on platforms
like Trustpilot, where you can see clearly that customers have had a terrible
experience with low-quality products that took a really long time to arrive.
And that they were unable to return without paying high fees.
And basically, once those reviews have piled up enough that people
stop purchasing from this website, they just shut it down, and
then they start up another one.
And so they are effective when they prey on people who are not paying quite
close enough attention or maybe have just come across this website before the
terrible reviews have started racking up.
And AI has accelerated them because it's now so quick and
easy to get these websites set up.
To help me understand more about this phenomenon, I spoke to Chris Emmins,
founder and CEO of KwikChex, a consumer protection organisation.
I don't think “prevalent” gets near it.
Not even “pervasive” gets near it, to be honest.
It's a part of the world we live in now, if you like.
I mean, it is absolutely everywhere.
Yeah.
We're expert in this, and we can't even figure
out quite what the numbers are.
It's extraordinary.
And it doesn't really matter where we look, you know, because we're
detecting things all the time.
Mm.
So if we look at online reviews, if we look at a company registration
resource like Companies House, or obviously social media, it's always there.
We can find them within seconds, frankly.
So it becomes a question of, well, two things really.
I mean, just how much is out there.
We know pretty much what that is.
It's thousands and thousands of businesses that are fraudulent or certainly
dishonest in some form or another.
In the world we live in, it's just so darn easy and cheap
Mm.
to do these things.
Yeah.
They now have AI on their side, of course.
Yeah.
Which means that a website can go up, you know, pretty much within an hour.
They could have drawn down all the images from other sites.
I mean, we see that all the time.
Yeah.
Obviously, you can do a reverse image search, as I'm
sure you've looked at.
And it will identify it came from another site, et cetera, et cetera.
But nevertheless, people do get drawn into that.
And the perpetrators aren't all silly enough to
have the price at such a low level that it's a red flag.
The better ones could use a sale, for example, and say,
Yeah.
“Sale now,” and it's still only 15 or 20% cheaper, so it
doesn't really alert people.
So much more is needed, in fact, to cope with this.
There is another element as well, which KwikChex has always been
interested in and assisted with, and that is one of the unfortunate
side effects of this sort of conduct, and the fact it's so pervasive, is
that it creates hurdles and hindrances for many legitimate businesses
in the independent sector
Yeah.
particularly.
Because I see a lot of advice saying “a company
you've never heard of” is often contained within the advice.
So what is the impact on the consumer now that they're really learning
that they can't believe their eyes?
So research by the user-generated content platform
Bazaarvoice has shown that 97% of consumers no longer rely on one source
anymore when they're purchasing.
That means that 97% of people will not just go straight to
a website and make a purchase.
They are cross-referencing everything.
They're looking at the website.
They're looking on Instagram to see what social media presence a company has.
They're looking at reviews.
They're checking TikTok.
They're going on Reddit and searching what people's experiences are like,
and maybe they're googling for information about this company as well.
This isn't paranoia.
This is adaptation.
I spoke to Doug Straton, the chief marketing officer of
Bazaarvoice, who explains more.
I think the big difference now in terms of multi-source
is, the digital environment has enabled shopping to
take place pretty much anywhere.
And so there's an element of what we used to call merchandising that
happens in social environments, broader media environments, not
just on a product description page within the retail environment.
And people don't engage or spend as much time in any one place for very long.
They're not captured, in other words.
And so their ability to kind of see the same message and the same merchandising
where it used to be just message and then drive them down the funnel, now the
message and the merchandising is happening upper funnel, mid-funnel, and
finally, you know, true lower funnel.
And I think that's the big difference.
It's both the way they're receiving the messages, the way we're merchandising
now in the physical and digital environments, and ultimately, the more
times you can hit people with, like, this is the message and then here
are the proof points that bolster the proposition of any given brand, product,
or service, that just drives the behaviour further, essentially.
So imagine someone has never heard of your business.
It was interesting that Chris Emmins mentioned that one of the pieces of
advice that is given to consumers to try and combat these ghost stores
is they ask consumers to think about and consider if they have
even heard of this company before.
Now, this is really difficult if you're a small business because
the vast majority of people in this world have not heard of you before.
So imagine that you've got a consumer who's coming to you who has been warned
to be wary of businesses that they've not heard of before, and they come across
your ad or they come across a mention of you and they want to know, are you real?
Are you a real person?
Which seems like a ridiculous question that you have to answer in 2026, but this
is the mindset that the consumer is in.
So what would they find if they went to your website or on your social media?
Would they see you as the founder?
Would they see reviews that they could read?
Do you have an active social media presence of some sort?
Do you have a Google My Business profile that they can reference?
Is there any press about you, about the business?
Are there any behind-the-scenes pictures?
Are there testimonials or pictures of your community or your customers?
Or is it just a Shopify website?
Trust isn't built on one page anymore.
It's built through consistency.
In addition, if you have got a physical store, make sure there are
pictures of that on your website because that is a big differentiator.
I wanted to talk to a bigger retailer to understand what the impact has been
on them and the way that they market their business when they are faced with
a customer that has a real lack of trust.
I wanted to reach out to Passenger Clothing.
Passenger Clothing is an outdoor clothing brand.
They are fast growth.
They are mostly e-commerce, and they have popped up in the Times 100 fastest growing
UK companies for three years in a row.
I sent them over some questions via email, and I got this response
from their CEO, Jon Lane.
And what he talked about, I think, is really important lesson
for us all to keep in mind.
He said that, "Transparency is really important to us and to our customers."
He says, "We currently have over 50,000 independent reviews on Trustpilot.
We also have over 65,000 reviews on our website to help customers make
informed purchasing decisions." And so I think this is a really good reminder
that social proof is really important.
And these big retailers, they are obviously collecting so
many more testimonials and reviews than a smaller retailer.
But it's interesting to see how they're really focusing on this because it
helps them answer that question.
If somebody comes across an ad for Passenger Clothing, they're able to go
and cross-reference that with a really deep bank of reviews to understand
that this is a genuine business.
But then I thought what was interesting was really how they approach their social
media and their community building.
He says, "We live for offline community moments, meeting our customers where they
play. Our strong social content strategy ensures we capture behind-the-scenes
moments. Our founder, Rich, features quite heavily to give our customers a
sense of the people behind the brand."
So Passenger aren't trying to prove as much that they're human.
They're simply documenting the fact that they are, which feels quite different.
They're almost deliberately creating these offline moments that they can then
capture and share online to prove that they are real, to show the behind the
scenes, to show the people behind the brand, and basically to put in a heck of
a lot more effort and energy than any of these spoof ghost websites are putting in.
So there's this whole bank of images as well as all those reviews.
There's all of this proof and documentation that they are in fact human
beings behind this business. Something else to keep in mind that was an interesting
side note to this whole investigation.
Most retailers think trust signals exist for customers, and clearly, as we've
seen from the Bazaarvoice research, that it is really, really important that
the customers are able to see and prove that to themselves that you are human.
But increasingly, these trust signals are also for AI.
This was the point in my interview with Doug Straton when I stopped thinking
specifically about these ghost stores and started thinking about what trust means
in the future for independent retailers.
Once the product is out there in the environment, people trust other people, or
what they perceive to be other people.
And so what we find, which is interesting now in the age of
AI, is that AI, of course, is now referencing human-sourced data, and
if you look at some of the job titles inside of some of the AI platforms,
they specifically call it out — vice president of human-sourced data.
They want the AIs to, of course, reflect the truth, because if
they don't, and people think they're all hallucinations and
nonsense, then they will lose the credibility and therefore their user base.
So you've got two things.
You've got people trust other people, and now you have AI
that trusts other people.
And that combination has been very fortunate, obviously,
for us because that's literally the core of our business.
So we're now becoming a place, or a service, that allows
shoppers and consumers to engage with products, but through the
voice of consumers and shoppers that have used or bought those products.
And AI and AI agents are also picking up that same information more and
more and more and using that to actually surface the products and
then ultimately to recommend the products, which creates a really
interesting dynamic. It's better to be lucky than to be great, you know?
We have a really good product, and we have had.
But now it's a new era, and we're lucky enough to be one of
those types of companies that is in a good position because trust is in
demand, and authenticity is in demand.
AI models, agentic AI, are increasingly looking at citations, backlinks,
reviews, structured information and human- generated content to assess
whether or not your business is reliable.
So citations, backlinks, whatever they can
essentially hoover up, or whatever's being fed to them directly, because
we're starting to do that too.
Because that gives a robust data set to work with.
Yeah.
This is incredibly relevant for small businesses.
You need to think about not just how to get the customers to trust you, but how
that trust is also going to filter into this new wave of agentic AI models that
may be searching and shopping directly from you on the customer's behalf.
They want to make sure that they're surfacing really
good quality results as well.
If you're listening to this podcast, you may think to yourself, "Well, this feels
quite overwhelming. I posted a reel about this on Instagram, and somebody said, "You
know, on top of everything else I've got to do, I've now got to prove I'm human.
How is that fair?" And it can feel unfair, and it can feel like an additional burden.
But I think the fundamental question to ask yourself is just
start by saying, “What do people see when they search for me?
Can they see who I am, where I'm based?
Can they see genuine customer reviews?
Can they see behind the scenes, real video, consistent
branding, active social media?"
Doesn't mean you have to be posting every day, but is it
at least updated once a week?
Can they see mentions elsewhere online about me and my business?
Because here's the reality.
Five years ago, we optimised our websites for Google.
Today, we optimise them for sceptical customers, and tomorrow we'll be
optimising them for AI agents.
So this is the key thing here.
Trust is in demand, and authenticity is in demand.
The good news for independent retailers is that authenticity is
one thing that you already have.
The challenge now is making sure that people and increasingly
AI can actually see it.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Why not head over to Instagram at Resilient Retail Club and let me know
what you thought about the episode?
And of course, if you like, follow or subscribe, you'll be the first
to know about each new episode when it's released on a Thursday morning.
See you next week.